Partition in a different theme
Manto Meant to Disturb
[Ayesha Jalal, noted historian from Pakistan, is the director of the Center for South Asian and Indian Ocean Studies at Tufts University, Massachusetts. In her most recent book, she explores Saadat Hasan Manto's life and times, especially around Partition. The book was the result of an invitation Jalal received to give the Lawrence Stone lecture at Princeton. She recently spoke to Garga Chatterjee. Excerpts:]
Q. What were you trying to achieve with your recent book on Manto?
A. I've tried to take the microcosm of Manto's life and his works and connect them to the microcosm of Partition. It really is my return to Partition in a different theme—I've written on the politics of Partition, about Partition in the sense of sovereignty and Partition and its human dimension. In this, I used Manto's life and his witnessing of Partition, as well as his broader engagement with the history of the time through his writings, to understand Partition.
Q. Why Manto?
A. I've long wanted to work on Manto. The project came my way when his birth centenary was looming. I'd also been made aware of the existence of some letters that Manto's younger sister and my sister-in-law had put together. So I started looking at them and thought I could do a micro-history of Manto—the man, the individual, his family and the larger context of Partition in a way that would work very well with the Lawrence Stone lecture. Lawrence Stone was a famous historian who called for the return of the narrative at a time when historical works were becoming more quantitative.
Q. Manto has possibly been increasingly read in recent times. What would a reader of his work derive from your book?
A. Partly it is about Manto, the human being, and Manto, the individual, as related to the society he grew up in and then subsequently engaged with in different cities. It is about his life and times and his work. It's not a work of literature, it's a work of history that shows how a new kind of historical narrative can be crafted that utilises the life and works of a literary figure that throws light on a major historical disjunction... His portrayal of the times of which he was a witness, his fictional narratives help the historian in a way an official archive cannot... He was a key witness to the post-colonial movement... he throws light in ways that journalistic and official accounts would not.
Q. Who has Manto been to the Pakistani state, in time?
A. There have been elected governments, notably the PPP government in the '70s, that returned Manto to TV and radio. But for the most part, for the Pakistani bureaucracy, Manto is seen as the writer of obscenity. He was charged for obscenity by the colonial and the post-colonial state. So that resistance to him has remained. As a result, he was banned from radio. The only time Manto was brought to television was under the Bhutto regime and in more recent times. For the most part, Manto was somebody to be shunned. That has changed a bit with the appropriation of Manto, not least the celebration of his life with the printing of his stamp and then the awarding of the highest civilian award to him. In India too, for different reasons Manto has not had state support.
In India, there's a different kind of appropriation which willy-nilly suggests that Manto should have been here.
Even if he stayed in India, there is no saying that he wouldn't become the target of Hindu fundamentalists. Manto basically disturbed a certain kind of self-contentment. He unsettles that for the upper classes in both countries so he is not somebody who is ever going to be seen widely as the gseat sort of hero. The themes he picks up are intended to disturb, not to make you feel good about yourself. I think upper classes in both countries, the elite generally, want to avoid having to face some of the scars of their own life and times. So I think this would apply to both. But Manto has survived and has been growing in stature despite the absence of state support, despite the ambiguous, hypocritical approach of the upper classes towards him.
Frontier
Vol. 45, No. 47, June 2-8, 2013
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